Specialization of Unique Abilities

I remember years ago just after quitting to trade full-time. The school year was approaching on the tail end of summer. I had just learned about crypto and decided to set up a mining rig.

It only took a week or two to piece everything together on the first motherboard, running everything via PCIe 1x USB wires. I installed Windows and tried to get all the devices recognized, but it was nearly impossible to get all the GPUs on one device. I later learned that this was a hardcoded limitation in Windows, which I could've bypassed if I knew how to install the Linux miners.

But I opted to get another board, set up behind the main rig. After attaching half the cards to it, I could finally utilize all the cores. All in, with the software configuration before and thereafter, it took at least 3 months to get everything up and hashing.

Education and Skills

This was quite a frustrating time period for me personally. I had no clue, honestly, how difficult it would be for me to configure the software needed to use this equipment. Indeed, I saw similar struggles in the vast difficulties I had setting up Truffle for simple contract testing in the first Vlad class.

I'm not quite sure what it is, but I've always just been really bad at system-level coding. Albeit, it's not a natural thing you're super obviously born with. Part of it is that I try feverishly to learn correct methods, but I just keep getting stuck on bugs for hours and hours on end repeatedly.

This is a completely normal part of coding developments, but I get really pissed off when it's just to get things to turn on and function—rather than actually innovative work like building custom systems. I want my codification efforts to support real production systems, not wind up wasted on entire days of toiling around to just run basic tools others configure in minutes. I just don't get some of the technical nuances some developers find as fodder food for one reason or another.

Personal Barriers?

I remember my H.S. math teacher saying once that I was exceptional and such, but even the brightest kids can "hit a wall" when it comes to arithmetic. I thought and think this is a limiting mindset, just as I might be imposing with my own abandonment of low-level coding. But I did see it pan out as true firsthand as it got exponentially harder for me to breeze through textbooks, and I had to spend days on end learning new concepts.

Perhaps these things aren't meant to come easily to students and such, but I do think there's a certain part of this work that should be fun. There are people who absolutely love working out differential equations, just as there exist developers who wet themselves thinking about low-level system configuration optimizations. That just isn't me, and I'm tired of trying to force these professions into my career.

While these more engineering-centric skills might legitimately sound cooler professionally, they are super fucking hard for me. Perhaps more meaningfully, they drain the hell out of my happiness, confidence, and progress. I can't think of a single meaningful win I've had in work that related to some super technical computer nuance.

Shifting Change Locust

Accordingly, after spending weeks trying to get Ubuntu to work with my 1070 after the mining surge incident, I'm begrudgingly going back to Windows.¹ I believe so wholeheartedly that open source needs one thing more than all else—and it's not development talent. The sector needs capital to fund survival and prosperity of diligent contributors who are so presently often left out hung to dry.

Trading fills my life with joy and invigorates me enough to sleep two hours a day for months on end. And I see so often how others struggle to even elementarily allocate their personal capital in anything conceptually sound. When I sprung for Computer Engineering because it was the only thing that sounded even remotely challenging enough in college, I thought I would uncover a path to bring those mining development skills into the professional workplace.

But I've learned so clearly since then that "highest starting salary" per major means so much more than the rudimentary skills they present in those isolated classrooms. I've seen quite enough to know that just about every aspect of that directive social system misaligns quite truly with the burning passions I've been gifted by the universe. I can't do it all myself, and I specifically can't make the technical side alone—I need to defer and explicitly focus quite exclusively on a new kind of capital allocation.²